I have this annoying touchpad problem: I move the pointer with the touchpad. Then, at the end of the movement (i.e. when I release contact with the trackpad) the pointer makes a small jump on the screen of (seemingly) random magnitude and direction.

I have a dual boot HP Pavilion dv7 with Mint 13, MATE, 64bit, and a SynPS/2 Synaptics Touchpad. Booting with Windows 7 does not show this issue, indicating to me that the touchpad H/W is ok. Using a mouse with Mint also works completely fine.

I have searched in Linux forums, including this one, but I cannot find a solution. Any help would be welcome!

Best regards, Eolith

Edit 1: just tried Ubuntu live USB - precisely the same problem.

Edit 2: now tried Fedora - same problem. Seems like a Linux distro-only problem since Windows 7 is fine. Any suggestions? Thanks!!

Anybody out there with any suggestion? It is making the laptop very hard to use, since it won't let me click on the place I want; I have to aim 2 or 3 times before it lands on the right place. I don't want to go back to Windows! Thank you in advance for your help!

I have this same issue. It's extremely irritating and I'm not sure what to do about it. I'm running Mint 14.1 on an HP ENVY DV6T-7200. Everything else works great, but the pointer jumping juuuust as I go to click on something drives me batty. Can anyone offer us any assistance? Please?

I have now installed as a triple boot also Ubuntu 12.10, and made sure I have the latest updates. Precisely the same exasperating problem! For this reason, and because there is no response in this forum since initially posting this issue 19 dec, I have also asked the same question to the Ubuntu user community, check out http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2098397. No luck as yet though ... but I will update here when I get any progress.

Have you tried changing the touchpad setting after you have installed the GSynaptics packages? Look in Menu - Prefrences - Mouse and Touchpad - then go to the second tab "Touchpad". You'll need to reduce or adjust the accelaration and sensitivity or whatever there "that has a bar" to the left (Slow or Low).

Yes, have tried that, to no avail: in my case it is not a problem of speed, or sensitivity, or acceleration. Whenever I stop moving the pointer and release my finger, regardless aforementions settings, it jumps away in an unpredictable direction for an unpredictable distance.

I have this same problem as well. It's driving me crazy. Anyone have any other suggestions?

I have a Lenovo IdeaPad y410p with the SynPS/2 Synaptics Touchpad and Linux Mint 15 with Cinnamon 64-bit. Touchpad works fine in Windows 8 but hops ~10 pixels after finger is released. Reducing sensitivity doesn't seem to help. My touchpad also has the Mac-style click-by-pushing-down-the-entire-pad which is very hard to do without wiggling the cursor, though it has no problems in Windows. It also only occaisonally triggers the right-click button when pressing it down (left and right clicks are integrated into the touchpad, not separate buttons). Furthermore, it sometimes looses two-finger scrolling even though the setting is checked in the GPointing Device Settings screen and I have toggle it off-and-on to get the scrolling back. Overall this is quite frustrating!

So it looks like three different programs are being added to handle the TouchPad. This is despite using the suggestion from the Linux Mint forums linked above of using MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*" in my xorg.conf. In fact, I have exactly their suggested InputClass section in my xorg.conf now. No success.

Edit: I see now in the xorg.conf.d that 'Default clickpad buttons' shouldn't be a problem. I also went ahead and disabled the evdev touchpad catchall entry in 10-evdev.conf. This successfully gets rid of the Xorg.0.log multiple-entries 'issue' but doesn't actually change my original problems.

Then start testing different values. For Accel Profile, test if 3 works better.For Constant Deceleration and Adaptive Deceleration, try increasing by 1 or 2, up to 16.For Velocity Scaling try decreasing the value to 5, and then 1, and then increasing the value above 10 by 5 at a time up to 30.

Two other properties that can be tested are Vertical and Horizontal Hysteresis. Use these commands:

Thanks for the clear post and detailed instructions! I tried playing with these values a bit and the problem lessens in magnitude considerably if I increase Device Accel Constant Deceleration to about 10. However, in that case the pointer becomes unbearably slow for general use! It does even still jump with those settings but only moves a pixel or two so I'm not sure that increasing speed through some other parameter wouldn't just bring back the jumping problem.

The hysteresis settings do manage to cut down on the frequency of the jumps a bit but not on their magnitude. I see no change in behavior from increasing beyond 50 but setting it to that initial 50 does do some good - even huge values like 500 shows jumps.

tgb wrote:I'm not sure that increasing speed through some other parameter wouldn't just bring back the jumping problem.

You could try increasing the acceleration in System Settings > Mouse and Touchpad. One person in the link below had success doing this (see post #7). Another increased the Velocity Scaling a lot higher (see post #6). I forgot to include this link in my first post. It's where some of my suggestions come from:https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1042069

In the link above the minimum and maximum speeds were both set to 1 by some.synclient MinSpeed=1 synclient MaxSpeed=1

I'm wondering if changing the FingerLow property would help. When the finger pressure drops below the set value, then a release event is registered. I think the default value is about 25, so try decreasing the value:synclient FingerLow=25